Title: Per-package machine-readable metadata about Upstream
DEP: 12
State: DRAFT
Date: 2014-02-23
Drivers: Charles Plessy <plessy@debian.org>, Andreas Tille <tille@debian.org>
URL: http://dep.debian.net/deps/dep12
Source: http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/dep/web/deps/dep12.mdwn
Abstract:
The source package control files and some of their derivatives are currently
used to document the URL of the home page of the work that is packaged
("upstream"). However, this approach is hard to extend to other information
describing upstream, because the size of the control files has to be limited
according to the limited power of some systems running Debian.
.
We propose a new file in the source packages, debian/upstream/metadata, formatted
in YAML to hold arbitrary information about upstream, for instance the
URL to a donation page, bibliographic information about publications
describing the upstream work, the URL to the upstream sources, etc.
.
The scope of this DEP is the format of the debian/upstream/metadata file, and the
specification of the most frequent fields. The flow of information from the
source packages to data providers such as the UDD is not specified here.
Please refer to http://wiki.debian.org/UpstreamMetadata for more information
on that subject.
.
Discussion takes place on the debian-qa mailing list.

Work in progress

The format of the metadata file is being described on
http://wiki.debian.org/UpstreamMetadata. Following the progress of the
discussion on the debian-qa mailing list, implementation details that made
consensus will be transferred here.